Fall 2022
In the Footsteps of the Snow Lion:
A Meditative Journey from Eastern Tibet to the US
Tuesday, October 11, 2022 at 4 pm
Fenton 110 and on Zoom
Join us for a lecture by Jamyong Singye, Tibetan Thangka artist. This lecture is also available via Zoom at this link. Please pre-register for the event at this link to receive the Meeting ID and passcode.
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Thangka Painting Workshop
Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 10:00 am
Thursday, October 13, 2022 at 3:00 pm
Register here
Join us for a lecture by Jamyong Singye, Tibetan Thangka artist. These workshops are for UO students only. Please visit this link to register. Registration is required prior to the workshop. Please bring the following supplies to the workshop: paper, pencil, ruler, eraser, brush, and watercolors.
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Invited Lecture
Where Great Powers Meet: America and China in Southeast Asia
David Shambaugh
Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science and International Affairs
Director of the China Policy Program
George Washington University
Thursday, November 10, 2022 at 4:00 PM in Crater Lake North
The United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this
competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia. In his recent book Where Great Powers
Meet, Professor Shambaugh focuses on the critical sub-region of Southeast Asia. e United States and China
constantly vie for position and in fluence–and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine
whether Asia leaves the American orbit a er seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of in fluence.
Just as importantly, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the US to China, the
fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear in their
competition. In this special lecture Professor David Shambaugh of George Washington University delves into
the complexities of the competition and asks whether the two superpowers can coexist.
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Korean Literature Association Annual Meeting 2022
Friday, November 11 and Saturday, November 12, 2022
Global Scholars Hall 123 and on Zoom
Join us for two days of panels exploring the notion of ‘resonance’ as an important heuristic device for Korean literary and cultural studies. This hybrid event is taking place in person and on Zoom. Please register for the Zoom link prior to the conference.
Register to join the event via Zoom!
Download the program here: KLA 2022 Program
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Invited Lecture
Understanding the microbial history of the Pacific Islands: Insights on human adaptations to new environments
Laura Weyrich
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Penn State University
Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 4:00 PM in the Museum of Natural and Cultural History
The settlement of the Eastern Pacific (the “Polynesian triangle” from Hawaii to Rapa Nui to Aotearoa New Zealand) represents the last great phase of prehistoric human exploration and expansion. Despite this incredible feat, we know incredibly little about immediate and long-term post-arrival impacts on human physiology and health. Arrival in unique locations with varied access to resources, new disease exposures, and altered diets likely resulted in differential adaptive strategies across distinct archipelagos. A new method – assessing ancient oral microbiomes within calcified dental plaque (calculus) – can provide insights into how humans adapted to new environments. Here, we sequenced ancient DNA preserved within dental calculus from three different Pacific Island Nations (Palau, Tahiti, and Aotearoa) in concert with local collaborators and communities. Distinct oral microbial communities were linked to the arrival in Central-East Polynesia, as well as settlement on individual archipelagos (i.e., in Tahiti), suggesting that settling in new locations may have altered microbes within these Ancestors. Further, oral microbiome shifts were linked with different environments and ecologies, as distinct microbiomes were present in people living on sand atolls versus forested high-islands. Several of these microbes associated with these different ecologies are linked to the modern-day presence of oral disease, providing unique opportunities to examine the origins of chronic disease in the Pacific Islands. Lastly, a phylogenomic approach to reconstruct the evolutionary history of 10 different vertically-inherited oral microbes revealed past relationships between people in the Pacific, suggesting that microbes were shared between island communities, likely through interisland connections and trade. A key oral species within the Anaerolineaceae family also corroborated large-scale patterns of human migration, suggesting that these microbial signatures can potentially be leveraged to identify Pacific Islander Ancestors with minimally destructive sampling approaches. Overall, our work reveals how microbial signatures in Ancestors can illuminate novel insights into human adaptation to new environments.
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Spring 2022
Barbarians, Bronzes, and National Imagination:
Exploring Legendary Co Loa
Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 12 pm
Lawrence 166
Please join us for a lecture by Nam C. Kim of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This lecture can also be attended via Zoom. Please email for the Zoom link to attend remotely. Two thousand years ago, China’s Han Empire stretched its imperial grasp beyond the mountains far to the south of the Central Plains, reaching into the domains of “barbarians.” Along its southernmost periphery lay the Red River Valley (RRV) of present-day Vietnam. In their chronicles, the Han claimed they had “civilized” the RRV’s “barbarians.” In contrast, many Vietnamese believe this time and location represent the birthplace of an indigenous, proto-Vietnamese civilization that predates Han arrival. This view is based on colorful tales and legends. One of the most enduring accounts tells of the Au Lac Kingdom and its capital city, known as Co Loa. At the heart of ongoing, intense, and sometimes nationalistic debates are two contrasting views. One sees civilization as a byproduct of Han arrival, while the other sees it as the outcome of local, indigenous cultural traditions. This lecture presents recent and ongoing archaeological research that addresses these themes and questions.
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Plumbing Nebulous Depths: Warfare in Humanity’s Past
Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 4 pm
Lawrence 166
Please join us for a lecture by Nam C. Kim of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This lecture can also be attended via Zoom. Please email for the Zoom link to attend remotely. When did warfare begin? Is it as old as humanity? How would we know? Signs of warfare appear as soon as we began creating our earliest written records several thousand years ago. But what can we see beyond that literary horizon? This lecture highlights anthropological research to contemplate warfare’s origins, providing a glimpse into past contexts of organized violence in the deeper recesses of humanity’s past. We will take a tour around the world, considering select cases across space and time, from the Ice Ages to the present day. The lecture explores the evidence for varied manifestations of war and what those data can reveal about our shared past, our evolution as a species, and our prospects for peace.
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Winter 2022
China beyond China; china within China: Zhangzhou ceramics, 16th to 19th centuries
Wednesday February 23th, 2022 at 5 pm
Zoom talk
Please join us for a lecture by Lucille Chia, Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. For a relatively brief period Zhangzhou in southeastern China rivaled the famed porcelain center of Jingdezhen in the amount of export ware it produced. The markets for Zhangzhou ware spanned the globe from Japan to Southeast Asia to the Middle East and the Americas, as well as its own local area. In her talk historian Prof. Lucille Chia from UC Riverside will explore how the history of Zhangzhou ware can help explain the rise and decline of export ceramics centers throughout of China over the centuries. You can attend the talk by using this Zoom link.
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The Daode Jing’s Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral Cult
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 at 5:00 pm
Lawrence 115
Hybrid in-person/online event
Join via Zoom at this link
Join us for a lecture by K.E. Brashier, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Humanities at Reed College, in person or via Zoom. The Daode jing is one of the most famous and oft-translated books in the world, but scholarship on it never asks, “Where did it come from?” In the early ancestral cult, forebears gradually lost identity, fading upward into lineage history and into the formless heavens. In the early Dao discourse, the named and distinct ten thousand things merged into a nameless, blurry, unified Dao. That is, both ancestral cult and Dao discourse traced out a spectrum that moved from individuation to unity, from tangible definition to loss of dualistic knowledge. These spectrums are not only parallel but also overlap because the Daode jing explicitly uses the ancestral cult to explain itself. Brashier‘s presentation speculates that the Daode jing didn’t arise out of nowhere but is in fact a child of the ancestral cult.
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Barbarians, Bronzes, and National Imagination:
Exploring Legendary Co Loa
Postponed to Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 12 pm
Location TBD
Please join us for a lecture by Nam C. Kim of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This lecture can also be attended via Zoom. Please email for the Zoom link to attend remotely. Two thousand years ago, China’s Han Empire stretched its imperial grasp beyond the mountains far to the south of the Central Plains, reaching into the domains of “barbarians.” Along its southernmost periphery lay the Red River Valley (RRV) of present-day Vietnam. In their chronicles, the Han claimed they had “civilized” the RRV’s “barbarians.” In contrast, many Vietnamese believe this time and location represent the birthplace of an indigenous, proto-Vietnamese civilization that predates Han arrival. This view is based on colorful tales and legends. One of the most enduring accounts tells of the Au Lac Kingdom and its capital city, known as Co Loa. At the heart of ongoing, intense, and sometimes nationalistic debates are two contrasting views. One sees civilization as a byproduct of Han arrival, while the other sees it as the outcome of local, indigenous cultural traditions. This lecture presents recent and ongoing archaeological research that addresses these themes and questions.
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Plumbing Nebulous Depths: Warfare in Humanity’s Past
Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 4 pm
Please join us for a lecture by Nam C. Kim of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This lecture can also be attended via Zoom. Please email for the Zoom link to attend remotely. When did warfare begin? Is it as old as humanity? How would we know? Signs of warfare appear as soon as we began creating our earliest written records several thousand years ago. But what can we see beyond that literary horizon? This lecture highlights anthropological research to contemplate warfare’s origins, providing a glimpse into past contexts of organized violence in the deeper recesses of humanity’s past. We will take a tour around the world, considering select cases across space and time, from the Ice Ages to the present day. The lecture explores the evidence for varied manifestations of war and what those data can reveal about our shared past, our evolution as a species, and our prospects for peace.
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Fall 2021
China Town Hall
2021
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
4:00 PM
On Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST, join us for 2021’s China Town Hall, a national conversation on how the U.S.-China relationship affects our cities, towns, and communities. From supply chains to national security, new technologies to climate change, the future of both countries will be determined by their relations with one another and the global community.
This year’s China Town Hall will feature keynote speaker Fareed Zakaria, host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN Worldwide and columnist for the Washington Post. His keynote address will be nationally broadcast starting at 4:00 PM. The UO is a local partner for this year’s China Town Hall and will be hosting an invited speaker, Elizabeth Knup, regional director of the Ford Foundation in China. She will speak at 5:00 PM, followed by Q&A. The local presentation will be moderated by University of Oregon Law Professor Eric Priest.
The Event Zoom link is: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/92059472725?pwd=WFZ6eEVqMFRqek1ZbENxR1pUNm5tdz09
Meeting ID: 920 5947 2725
Passcode: 688561